Laura Santtini's Easy Tasty Magic is a specialist ingredient range for the boutique generation. If you had doubts about her fashion-meets-food intentions, note that I have only seen her stuff in two shops: Selfridges, London and Selfridges, Birmingham.
The Easy Tasty Magic website is beautiful and reads like a dream - the brand is as much about words as taste and look, from the lavishly named Carnal Sin seasoning rub to an 'elixir' called Angels Dust and Broken Halos. Laura's products vary from the extravagantly priced but clearly gorgeous (her alchemical larder includes such relative humdrummery as lavender and nutmeg but looks like a stained glass window of teeny pill pots) right the way to the I-would-kill-for-this magic of a brandy spray dosed with gold powder. Of course I don't know what I'd do with it - I just know I want it.
One of her most shouted-about inventions is the Taste No 5 Umami Paste. For those who don't know (and if you do, that's a gold star and a sugarplum), umami is the 5th taste - as in the name, see? On your tongue there are taste receptors for salt, sweet, sour, bitter and, it has turned out, savouriness, better known to food pricks by its Japanese name: umami. That's what you taste in roast beef, mushrooms, Marmite and aged cheese. Laura has made a paste out of it.
Now I don't know if my expectations were too high. What did I think, that she'd chemically extracted 'umami' with some funny-shaped glass evaporating tubes, and cajoled it into easy-to-squeeze form? Would that even be nice? Pure salt or sugar aren't good eating, after all. Well, she hasn't done that. In a sense, Laura has cheated (no gold star for her) by simply mashing lots of umami-rich foods into a paste. So, for ingredients she has:
And what, Laura, should we do with this paste? Well: 'Simply rub, squeeze or spread this versatile paste for explosive results. RUB into raw meat, poultry, fish, roasts or vegetables to season before cooking. SQUEEZE into stir-fries, pastas, risottos, soups, stews, burger/tartare mix, dips, mayonnaise …'. Ok ok, etc etc. One can also SPREAD. So I did.
It tasted, and this is before I've looked at the ingredients, like a mix of tomato paste and garlic paste. But there is a more sophisticated tang. It's like black olives, or Marmite, or parmesan. I guess that's what they call umami. It's the bitterness you get at the back of good beer (no lager!) or red wine. Yumzer. I can imagine using this paste in a lot of things, and using it quickly, though in something that's deeply savoury anyway it may get lost. No Spanish stews, I would think.
I'm not sure the paste quite warrants the word mileage used on the packet, but hey, I'm the last person to criticize excessive verbiage, as the phrase 'excessive verbiage' so expressively demonstrates. Fortunately, it's one of the cheapest items in Laura's larder, so I may stock up again soon.
Thanks to my stateside friend Hanna of El Estomago blog for her post suggestion. Always happy to get ideas …
Yaaaaay! Thank you so much for blogging this!!! Unfortunately, I was hoping that reading your review would quell my intrigue, but sadly, now I'm all the more keen to try it ;-P Hmmmmmm, I am even tempted to make my own umami paste from that handily-photographed ingredients list....
Posted by: El Estomago | 03/23/2010 at 02:40 AM
It was a great pleasure. If you Facebook message me your address I'll post you some - I'll be in Selfridges next month so should be able to pick a tube up …
Posted by: Debbie | 03/23/2010 at 10:08 AM